Sunday, December 06, 2015

ISIS Opens For Business In Afghanistan

ISIS flag raised in Afghanistan.

Long before the UK Parliament debated bombing ISIS in Syria, long before France started bombing ISIS in Syria, or the Paris terrorist outrage that triggered the French escalation of their was with terrorism, long before Vladimir Putin grew bored with watching the ineffectual efforts of the USA to look as if they were opposing ISIS while really they were only interested in overthrowing Assad, we Boggart Bloggers and Daily Stirrers were warning western leaders that bombing Syria as they had bombed Libya would only create a failed state like the mess Libya now is.

Bombs will never defeat a fighting force like ISIS because they are not regular soldiers, terrorists do not hve standing armies. Thus when things get hot, the ISIS fighters, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, like Al Qaeda in Pakistan, like Boko Haram in Nigeria and like the Viet Cong simply dissolve into the general population.

In fact as the pounding they are getting from Russian air power and Iranian ground troops puts ISIS on the back foot in Syria and Iraq, we learn they have opened a new branch of the franchise in ............... guess where ................. Afghanistan, where the last troops of the US Army of Occupation recently pulled out after ten years of fighting guerilla warfare.

"We do not accept compromise or humiliation. We will either become captors or martyrs. We either want honor and liberty or death with nobility and martyrdom. On the path of Allah, we consider imprisonment worship, we consider extradition vacation, and we deem death martyrdom.

This is the propaganda messages from Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) published in Fatah (meaning "victory" in Arabic), a pamphlet published in local languages and being distributed in Afghanistan and
Pakistani, in Peshawar, a Pakistani city on the border with Afghanistan and in Muslim areas in norther India.
The pamphlets invite citizens of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of Islamic State and join the jihad against the infidel.

In three weeks since the pamphlets began appearing, it was reported that ISIS aligned militants launched
their first offensive in Afghanistan’s central province, Ghazni alongside Taliban fighters, which left more than 100 people dead. Guerillas carrying the black flags of ISIS overran several villages, beheaded family members of local dignitaries, were involved with Afghan military personnel and police officers, and burned at least 60 homes. The attack came as a shock to many political and news reporting organisations in the region. The received wisdom had been that Afghanistan was not on the agenda for ISIS.

Why has ISIS chosen to reach out to this region, bypassing the many other nations bordering its current stronghold in Syria and Iraq?

The answer could be that the failure of secular governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan to deliver stability and security, has contributed to growing support for extremism and sympathy for alternative forms of government such as theocracy. Acceptance of a even a hardline, theocratic Caliphate — such as ISIS promises to impose across the Muslim world is seen by many among the poorer classes as desirable to the kleptocratic governments supported by the west. ISIS regularly boasts of its effectiveness in delivering justice (public beheadings etc.) in their propaganda campaign.

Additionally, over the past decade, extremist ideology and violent jihad has been systematically
promoted in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Islamic fundamentalist regional powers, such as
Saudi Arabia, Qatar. Pakistan’s powerful military establishment and their proxy groups offer a similar kind of brutal order and though such governments are as blatantly corrupt as western imposed secular regimes they use the religious angle to demand loyalty and total control of the media to suppress dissent. These countries
see violent extremism as a strategic instrument to gain leverage in regional politics.

There is also ideological proximity between ISIS and one of Afghanistan’s dominant extremist group The Taliban. Their aims, and methods are similar, although they are not affiliated. During the Taliban’s rule in the 1990s, the Taliban massacred Shia Afghans and vandalized shrines and sacred historical sites — most spectacularly the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan province. They carried out public executions, revived medieval punishments such as stoning and engaged in the kind of brutal tactics that ISIS uses today to exercise power through fear.

ISIS appears to have assessed the situation and wants to take both tactical and strategic advantage by reaching out to Afghanistan and Pakistan and possibly merging The Taliban into their own ranks. Every declaration of allegiance to ISIS in this part of the world and every battle fought under ISIS’s flag —
no matter how small or big — is a victory for their sophisticated (and on evidence western backed) public relations campaign.